The government has withdrawn its draft New Encryption Policy proposed by DEITY. As per the draft policy, messages sent through any over-the-top service as well as SMS would needed to be mandatorily stored in plain text format for 90 days and made available on demand to security agencie. In addition, the policy required all citizens and institutions/ogranisations to submit their encryption keys to the government. In case of non-adherence, the policy proposed a legal action including imprisonment. 

The draft policy defined ‘B category’ as all statutory organizations, executive bodies, business and commercial establishments, including all Public Sector Undertakings, Academic institutions. The ‘C category’ were all citizens including personnel of government and business performing non-official or personal functions.

Further, all service providers located within and outside India that use encryption technology for providing any type of services in India were required to register themselves with the government as per the draft. Also, users in India were allowed to use only the products registered in India.